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Hello. I am not trying to cause mischief in entering the same problem in this discussion area that I entered in another. It&#39;s just that I still have a headache of a problem and am hoping a different group of readers might have a solution.

I have always regularly defragmented my drive and scanned for viruses, adware, and trojans. I have always regularly run (not sure this is a technical expression) my registry clean-up program.

The present problem I have with XP I rarely had in the four years I ran W2000. While Windows XP usually allows me to make long file names (by this, I mean 200 - 215 characters) it sometimes freezes up when trying to work with them. For instance. I can make a 200 + character file name for a jpg file in Photoshop stored to Explorer. However, sometimes when I:

1) during one session move it from one folder to another, no problem. But, when I try to move/copy it to a second folder, the prompt often says "file name too long."

2) If I have a 200 + file name (and sometimes even as small as 100 characters!!!) it may not open in Photoshop until I chop the name down to some size Explorer likes at that time.

3) If I have some of the 200 - 215 character file names in a folder and try to move the folder, I sometimes can&#39;t. And such a folder sometimes didn&#39;t delete in W2000 nor after my upgrade to XP (to solve this problem) despite giving the "right" (I don&#39; know the term) to do so. Eventually, though, over the coming weeks or so, it is possible to delete such folders - I don&#39;t know the circumstances why.

4) Sometimes these files when moved or copied are truncated in the process and don&#39;t open unless the jpg extension is added.

All told, the long file name issue can cause things to take three to five times as long. When working with dozens of files, this can drag a session out.

5) A related problem may be that for months now WORD keeps generating recovered documents that I?ve been working on. This has happened and hundreds and hundreds of times. For the last three months I?ve been using doc files. Before when using rtf files, it happened three times as much. With doc files, it only 1/4th the problem it was with rtf files.

SOLUTION ATTEMPT: Someone suggested updated mother board drivers. I did download the latest drivers for my motherboard a few weeks back but this did not help.

ENVIRONMENT: I am using Windows Home version now with FAT partitions. I encountered these problems first in w2000 using NTFS. I upgraded to Home with NTFS and still had them. I then upgraded to Windows Professional with NTFS and still had them. Had unrelated problems in Word but that along with the continued problem with long file names caused me to think that going back to Windows Home might work if in addition I converted to FAT - which I did; and that&#39;s what I have now. So, I still have this long file name problem under FAT (my drive is partitioned with the operating system under NTFS and the data partition under FAT).

Correction. In the post I just made I contradicted myself saying I rarely had the long files names problem with W2000. I did have this problem with Windows 2000 with an NTFS partition but I don&#39;t remember having this with W2000 and the earlier FAT partitions I used for several years.

The best solution is Long Path Tool. Long Path Tool is very useful if you are having problems in deleting, unlocking, copying and even renaming files that are considered filename too long by your system.